Mowbray began his stage career in London in 1922 as an actor and stage manager. In 1923 he arrived in the United States More than sixty years later, in
Julian Fellowes'
Gosford Park (2001) the fictitious
Hollywood film producer spending a weekend in an
English country house tells an associate on a transatlantic telephone call that Alan Mowbray would be a good casting choice as a butler for a proposed
Charlie Chan movie set in England, then goes on to say "These people here look like Alan Mowbray. I mean, they're sort of tall, and they don't say too much. And they have fucking British accents, right?" Mowbray appeared in five more pictures in 1931, notably portraying George Washington in
Alexander Hamilton. In 1935, he played one of the male leads in
Becky Sharp, the first feature-length film in full-colour
Technicolor, as well as playing the lead in the farcical
Night Life of the Gods, based on a
Thorne Smith novel. It was for another Thorne Smith–derived film,
Topper (1937), that Mowbray may be best remembered; he played Topper's butler Wilkins, a role he reprised the following year in
Topper Takes a Trip. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mowbray worked steadily, appearing in over 120 films, including the Oscar-nominated
My Man Godfrey (1936),
That Hamilton Woman (1941), and
John Ford's
My Darling Clementine (1946). In the 1950s, Mowbray's film roles decreased and he began to appear on television. He played the title role in the
DuMont TV series
Colonel Humphrey Flack, which first aired in 1953–54 and was revived in 1958–59. In the 1954–55 television season, Mowbray played Mr. Swift, the drama coach of the character Mickey Mulligan, in NBC's short-lived
The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan. He portrayed the character Stewart Styles, a
maitre d with a checkered past in the 1960-1961 adventure/drama series
Dante, reprising a role he had originally played in several episodes of
Four Star Theatre. Mowbray appeared in the titular role as a crooked astrologer in the 1959 episode "
The Misfortune Teller" of the
Maverick television series starring
James Garner and
Kathleen Crowley, and as Cranshaw in the episode "Quite a Woman" of the 1961 series
The Investigators starring
James Franciscus. In 1956, Mowbray appeared in three major films,
The King and I,
The Man Who Knew Too Much and
Around the World in 80 Days. His final film role was as Captain Norcross in
A Majority of One in 1961. In 1963, he returned to
Broadway in the successful comedy
Enter Laughing, playing Marlowe, the unscrupulous mentor to David Kolowitz (played by
Alan Arkin). Mowbray was a founding member of the
Screen Actors Guild in 1933, writing a personal check to fund the group's incorporation and serving as the first vice president. ==Personal life and death==